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Zusatztext Praise for The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton “The editors succeed gloriously! meeting the needs of the whole spectrum! from general readers to advanced students. A modernized text! one sensitive to Milton’s poetic rhythm! illuminates both the author’s meaning and artistry. This is a beautiful edition.”—Marina Favila! James Madison University “A remarkable combination of scholarly rigor and sensitivity to literary values! expressed in prose of exemplary clarity and extraordinary grace.”—Edward W. Tayler! Columbia University Informationen zum Autor John Milton Klappentext Edited by William Kerrigan, John Rumrich, and Stephen M. Fallon The legendary author of Paradise Lost and other poems was also a superb and provocative prose writer. Culled from Modern Library's definitive The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton, this indispensable collection, authoritatively annotated and updated for this new volume, now includes selections from Milton's Commonplace Book and the complete text of The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates in addition to Milton's letters, pamphlets, political tracts, and essays. Milton tackles diverse subjects and takes controversial positions, including notorious defenses of divorce and protests against censorship. With expert analysis, a chronology of the author's life, clean layouts, and a comprehensive index, The Essential Prose of John Milton is an invaluable keepsake-a book bound to be a revelation for all readers of this monumental author. "Meticulously edited, full of tactful annotations that set the stage for his work and his times, and bringing Milton, as a poet and a thinker, vividly alive before us."-Robert Hass, former Poet Laureate of the United StatesINTRODUCTION John Milton wrote most of the poetry for which he is celebrated when he was either in his twenties or in his fifties and sixties. During his thirties and forties—at the time of life when Shakespeare wrote most of his plays (and all of his mature ones)—Milton composed relatively little verse: 16 sonnets, 17 psalm translations, and occasional poems amounting to 107 lines in Latin and 4 in Greek. Instead of more poetry he wrote enough prose to fill nearly seven of the eight hefty volumes that make up the Yale edition of his Complete Prose Works. Early in this period, in a passage from The Reason of Church Government (1642), at once self-deprecating and self-promoting, he expressed his frustration that the political and social turmoil of the time seemed to require controversial prose and left little leisure for poetry: “I should not choose this manner of writing, wherein knowing myself inferior to myself, led by the genial power of nature to another task, I have the use, as I may account it, but of my left hand” (this page). Yet his contemporaries knew him better for this not-so-genial prose than for the poetry he believed himself born to write. Modern readers may find this historical fact difficult to digest because his prose writings are not so immediately pertinent now as they were in their original historical circumstances. Had Milton never written a line of verse, an academic audience might still have found its way to several of the prose works, most likely including Of Education, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, and The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. Areopagitica would perhaps have reached a wider audience, both for its rhetorical brilliance and its landmark contribution to the developing case for freedom of expression. But without the poetry to spark our interest, few today would read much of the prose. And that would have been our loss, as the vigorous, combative, and often luminous prose gathered in this volume suggests. Milton championed causes that provoked and sometimes outraged his first readers and remain controversially relevant today inasmuch as they address...
